Music
I have for many years had a passion for music, and have made great efforts in composing original music.
Personal work
In 2019 I finally decided to post music online, this is something I had hoped to keep up, and still intend to return to, as I have not stopped working on music. Constantly attempting my own game making projects has necessitated continuing to compose new music, even if the games don’t get released, or even far into development. I released an E.P with the name “Indigo Soundscape” to various streaming services. Or you can listen to the first track here:
In University Projects
In my first year, as a group project myself and a handful of other programmers worked on a bullet hell game called “Attack on the seven seas”. I composed 7 tracks for this, one for each of the seven stages in the game, the “seas”, so each track has a clear theme, and belongs to a certain stage. (Fair warning to anyone brave enough to listen to this early work: They don’t sound good outside of the context of the stages they were made for)
In my 2nd year there was a module consisting of 3 projects, week long game jams, in teams of 6 or 7, typically being 4 games design students and 2 or 3 games programming students. Despite being a programmer and not a designer, in all 3 of the games I worked on I composed music. Since each project consisted was only a week long I made a single track for each one.
“The Mad Lands” was the first of these, a 2-d platformer in which the player would have to navigate simple but deceptive puzzles. Besides the puzzles themselves there were no real dangers to overcome, meaning the theme would have to have a relaxing, slow pace to it with instruments gradually getting added as the player would make progress in the game.
“Cybertank”, the second game jam was a futuristic arena survival game in the form of a twin-stick shooter in which the player would control the titular Cybertank and defend hoards of incoming drones, meaning the theme would have a cold and dark heavily synth-based sound.
For the third game jam we were given the brief “minute hero” hence the track is a minute long. The objective of the game was to complete as many short objectives as quickly as possible. Instead of having a health bar for this game I wrote code that would make the player lose 10 seconds, the music would also skip 10 seconds forward. The game was a fast paced first person shooter in which the graphics were not realistic and the aesthetic was soft and playful, so the track had to match that.
For both the latter 2 of these 3 I also made all the game’s sound effects
6th form
My first attempt was an Extended Project Qualification in 6th form, in which I wrote an original guitar piece. The objective I set for myself for this project was to create a piece that invoked elements of metal, and elements of prog rock, using some scales that were antithetical to popular music. At the time I was not aware of any kind of principles in music mastering or engineering. The resulting piece was not good, but it was a start.